Silver & Credit Money in Ancient Athens | History of Money
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- Опубликовано: 4 июл 2024
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The silver Drachmae was basically the dollar of the Ancient Mediterranean and Ancient Greece in general. Want to know why? Then, check out this video.
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The script for this video can be found here:
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Narrated and produced by Dr. Joeri Schasfoort (University of Cape Town)
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Extended description:
Besides the rise of the Athenian 'owl coin,' this video covers money in Mesopotamia, the government, treasury and mint of Athens, private banking, finance (with an emphasis on ship finance), as well as financial law in Ancient Athens. Basically, it covers the entire financial monetary system of this awesome city state that monetarily dominated the Ancient Greek world.
I swear Money and Macro is just a complete improvement over the economics explained RUclips channel
Money and Macro is the reason why intellectuals must exist. We have too many fearmongers and conspiracists that disinform us on the economy and mislead people to buy into hoaxes and paranoia.
Economics Explained feels a bit like ECON 101 and Money and Macro feels a little more like digging into the current research data and controversy. I can see each one serving the needs of a different audience
@@bunnybunnyloaf I used to think that until Economics Explained woefully missed the mark by a mile on his video about wealth inequality and saying that the Netherlands, collectively known as the Dutch, was the most divided nation in regards to wealth inequality
And luckily this guy here running the Money and Macro channel, himself of dutch ancestry and a professor of economics in S. Africa, made a very well done video discussing the issues regarding wealth inequality across nations and how EE needed to go back and look at his research a little bit more
Absolutely.
Theyre not the same type of channel tho....
A minor correction. In 4:35 you say "Turkish cities", the proper term is Anatolian since turks didn't exist in anatolia at this time period.
fair enough :)
@@MoneyMacro A 1400 year mistake lol, well technically 1700 years, since only in 1300's AD did the Turks reach the coast of Anatolia. And Athens was already an economic superpower in -400 BC.
@@celdur4635 what he said is an obvious mistake but what you say doesn't make sense also, since the beginning of Ottoman Empire is 1299 and Seljuk's were in Anatolia long before that.
@@someonesomeone529 But not on the coast.
@@celdur4635 that is also not true because there were some time periods when Seljuks ruled the "coasts", also we are talking about Anatolia, not the "coast", I don't know which coast you mean but anyway.
My main source for this video was the book "Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
", by William N. Goetzmann
Specifically the chapter on Athenian Finance, and its monetary revolution. Great book, I can recommend it!!
Interesting. I enjoyed reading Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" which is similar.
Thanks - I'm ordering the book. The Sumerians were trading into Anatolia thousands of years before the rise of Athens, so they must have used some sort of proto-monetary system for trade. This is a twist in the tale that you haven't told ...
Trapeza - a table (board), which is not so far from Italian "banco" (bench/board) used for the same purpose.
Ancient Athenians understood very well the importance of money velocity,so there was the custom of θεωρικά(theorikA):usually a rich person would cover the cost of a theatrical play or the maintance of a warship or something else.This is how they managed to keep the money flowing from the top back to the general economy.
Aristotle considerd money hoarding(οβολοστατική-ovolostatikI) as very bad for the economy and social stability.
ah, looks even today we have things to learn from ancient times. Sounds very reasonable ideas and applications.
@@effexon Learn what, the rich and super rich of today's world don't hoard money, they have it invested in their and other's businesses.
@@celdur4635 this smart use of public jobs as both equality measure/social welfare AND money distribution/inflation mechanism... afaik all public jobs in west are cushy "for life", which aint best system.. breeds corruption and ineffectiveness and stagnation in culture there + costs via pensions and such, as politicians pamper these people over everyone else.... NJ story like this
@@effexon
Its the socialists that push for "public jobs" its not necessary today as it was for ancient Athens. They just do it to get cushy for life jobs as you put it.
As a fan of Assassin's Creed and your channel, I love how you utilized the "education mode" of this game. I always appreciated that Ubisoft put this mode in their games and it's nice to see it in use on something like this.
I've just discovered your channel this week and I really liked your explanations! Very good video btw...
Nice video! As being born in Athens I will correct your pronunciation of the word "trapeza". In Greek the right way to say is "trApeza", not "trapEza". And the modern greek word of "table" is "trapEzi". Maybe it truly comes from those times where banking business was done on the table.
This is a happy coincidence. I was just having dinner with a Greek national. I read him your comment and he helped me practice to correctly pronounce trApeza :)
@@MoneyMacro haha
Absolutely fascinating man. Had this video on the backlog for a long while, so glad I finally got around to watching it! Very cool background footage as well, really brings the narrative to life rather than just some old ruins hehe.
10:45 The italian word for Bank, "banca", or originally "banco" means also "desk". Now I don't know who copied whom, but just wanted to point out this.
Knowing the Athenian system predated the rise of Rome by centuries, my bet is on the Athenians introducing the concept.
Very well done! Please keep it up.
this is amazing, thanks
This was fun to listen to!
Nice use of assassin creed odyssey footage
Thanks!!
yeah, really good way of subliminal advertising.
@@apricotcomputers3943 haha I wish they paid me for it though...
Very well presented, thanks for sharing.
Thanks!
This is fascinating!
Thanks! I thought so as well :)
one of your best series, please do more videos on the history of economics and finance
Great content
Very interesting!
Thank you👍🏽
The $ is not the dollar sign, it's the mexican peso sign, but it was so popular that ended up being used by a lot of countries in Latin America and the US. It was a sign that was minted into the 8 reales coin that were also silver, minted in Mexico.
Not only mexico it was the coin of the Spanish Empire, also minted in Lima and other places.
Isn't that the symbol of the "Piece of Eight"?
The term "Dollar" comes from the Spanish, and the English Colonies used Spanish coins as it was borderline illegal for British pounds to leave Britain.
@@Seth9809 No Dollar is a variation of the low german word Daler, (in modern German Taler), but it was used for these coins.
@@dr.wahnsinn9913 I was more referring to this.
"Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the real, a Spanish silver coin, was the currency of reference for world trade. The English in the American colonies called it the 'Spanish dollar' and ended by adopting it as their own."
Good video
Very interesting...
Wasn't Lydians, in Anatolia actually first who made coin from electrum? Where other Greek cities adapted it.
This.
The Lydian coin wee not widely used outside of Lydia, Miletus, did copy the coins with a single lion, but it was Aegina that had the first trade coins around 550 BC.
Yes, he didn’t directly say the Athenians invented coins but it could easily be implied. The Lydians also used silver coins before the Athenians too.
Thank you for a very interesting presentation. It might be worth noting here that the drachma was probably the longest used currency in history. I think it started life in the archaic period and was withdrawn from circulation when Greece adopted the euro (2001).
As you very rightly mentioned, grain was coming from Asia Minor (not Turkey, at that time period) but also from Egypt, Sicily and other locations. Grain was also coming from within Greece itself. Evia is the second-largest Greek island. It is near Athens and it was a major producer of grain. Evia was a vital source of food for Athens and controlling it was of major strategic importance.
But grain was by no means the only trade, although it was of vital importance. Indeed, many other goods were shipped around the Med, to the great advantage of the city’s finances and thus power and influence. Before Athens, the Minoans and others did the same.
No en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_drachma?wprov=sfla1
Greece had the phoenix before the modern drachma
This is why Athens could recover so quickly after military and demographic disasters. Also recent research suggest grain was able to be provided by the local plain in Attica, so Athens wasn't so dependent on imports as previously thought. That would suggest those grain imports were mostly for trade to the wider world.
Dit is serieus interessant
Tangential to the topic of the video, is the coin at 5:17 clipped? I think so. Look at the straight edge right above the owl's head on the reverse, right photo, and above the mohawk-like plume (which was more like a stiff brush than a plume) on the guy's helmet on the obverse, left. Looks like the clipping strike was done with a chisel from the obverse side: the edge is slightly rounded there, while on the reverse side there is a little relief protrusion, like a little border along this straight line. FWIW, this is an Attic tetradrachm, which was being minted in Athens from about 450 to 400 BC.
That was a common problem with ancient coinage; clipped coins are far from being high-value collectibles for being clipped alone. :) In hindsight, just like the stirrups for horse riding, the collar for striking coins, a piece of sheet metal with a round hole at the very basic level, which makes them nice and round, was a very simple but very late invention. It's always surprising, in retrospect, how very complex, nearly industrialised societies missed such at the first sight obvious inventions.
It's funny that the American penny coin ($0.01) costs today nearly five times in raw materials. A law has been adopted making it a crime to remelt them, and there is always a story behind any prohibition. :) I don't think they're still minted.
2:40 Weighed, not weighted. If you want to determine how heavy something is, you weigh it. To weight something means to attach a weight to it, to deliberately make it heavier.
Second language speaker things
Wow! You are gold mine (pun intended). Great video. Great channel.
Hehe thanks!
For some reason I thought I remembered from high school history class that the Achaemenid Persians invented coins. That _is_ around the same time and place, I notice.
EDIT: I think this must have something to do with the Achaemenid empire just being big, so it was a big deal when it started minting coins under Cyrus the Great. Wikipedia says this was after Cyrus took over Lydia (on the Aegean coast of Anatolia) and that Herodotus credits Lydia with being the first he knew of to mint coins, and Wikipedia agrees that the earliest coins are from Anatolia, although Wikipedia first mentions that China started minting coins centuries earlier.
The athenian silver tetradrachm ( 4 drachmai) was the dollar of the med. 14.17 gramms of silver. With the help of Alexander these coin standard weights conquered the east , which had the Babylonian silver standard. Drachma had such an influence for a standard and trustworthy coin that a lot of Arab countries had and still have Dirham as the name of their currency. A name which originates from drachma.
It seems to me that the reason that gold, silver, and grain were a good basis for currencies is that all of them are proxies for productive capacity. Thus, they had the nice feature of expanding and contracting with economic activity AND innovations. I think a modern day equivalent would be energy production. What do you think? Would a new currency based on energy production be feasible?
The problem with energy is that it especially with interruptable solar and wind, it varies by time of day. It is expensive to store. Do you see large stockpiles of oil? And its value is highly dependent on the need for it at that moment. If it would start to be a feasible to use it as basis for currency, then you would start to see large stockpiles of mined coal and refined aluminum. I think that with today's economics, energy does not have any particular likely role as a basis for a new monetary system.
@@richdobbs6595 To storage Oil is the easy part, look for example at the strategic reserves. But with electric energy its nearly impossible to store a reasonable amount.
How about something regarding of Bractaeten or Wörgl and their history.
Any chance of a review of the Ancient Carthaginian or Massilian economies? I know the answer is probably "Barter," but still, they were major regional economies at the same time as ancient Athens and Rome.
Carthage probably had a similar system to Athens since they shared the same time period and were massive traders.
7:38 As an idea for a future video, how about discussing the 19th century experience of western economies, characterized by dramatic output growth and periods of significant price deflation? The inability of the supply of metallic currency to keep pace with output growth doesn't seem to have led to the volatile prices you say are a necessary consequence in this video. (However "volatile" prices may have been in this period, to insist on the point seems self-defeating, considering that this volatility is dwarfed by post-WW2 inflationary episodes, when money supply could expand virtually without limit.)
Could it be that the governments enforced capital controls, i.e. limited food and other prices by law? Just a thought.
@@whatsupbudbud I don't think so. While capital and price controls were not completely unknown in the 19th century, they were definitely not a feature of western economies in this period.
@@danieltemelkovski9828 Can't say I am the wiser but capital controls have been used as far back as the Roman empire, plus they make sense for a government to be used when they employ monetary inflation practices. Could you give an example of a particular nation of the period where the effects you mentioned (output growth & deflation of prices) could be observed?
It is more the Euro of the Ancient Mediterranean, since the Euro is valid in the same region of those ancient civilizations of Cyprus; Greece and Italy.
Ok gamer I see you
The $ is the symbol of peso not Dollar. By Peso y mean the Spanish colonial peso symbol. The dollar copy it with a double vertical line. The peso became unused in Spain but stay in several ex colonies. The $ is one of the Hercules columns shown in the Spanish flag. The symbol was copied in the dollar because at the beginning of the USA they were closed to imitate the currency and coinence system and almost called American Peso instead of dollar
Blessed by Father Jupiter!
Call me dubious. The practice of weighing things is a well established and not easily defrauded practice. OTOH, it is much more challenging to guarantee the purity of silver in coins. By mixing in lead with other metals, it is possible to dramatically change the silver content while not changing the specific gravity of coins. If you look at the vast rounds of inflation caused by changing the silver content of coins as well as the petty thievery of clipping coins, I really doubt that there was much advantage in coinage in avoiding the necessity to weigh coins. More so in guaranteeing some level of purity in the minted coins.
a few minor corrections:
money is first discovered by lydians, not by athenians..
grain mainly came to athens from today's crimea and ukraine, not from "turkish cities"..
great video, none the less.. if you can also make a video on the temple economies of ancient near east, it will be greater still..
4:30 "in the Turkish cities where most grain came from"
You probably should have said "Anatolian", since the word "Turkish" is strongly associated with Turkic peoples, who would not in habit modern day Turkey (Anatolia/Asia Minor) in large quantities until about the 11th century CE.
Just fucking great.
Anyone who says money is evil, dosen't understand human history or economics in general.
now we have people taking credit and the citizens paying for that sunk ship.
I guess that put a not very rich Athenian in charge for an expedition would have made fraud more difficult..
for the cheater it would have been more difficult to hide the wealth obtained, to obtain the complicity of the crew (in case of survivors), to stop abroad and be safe..
The video refers to "Turkish Cities" as the source of Athens's grain. I understand that you're trying to simplify things and just referring to the region as Turkey. But it is important to remember that we are talking about twenty-five hundred years ago and there were no Turks yet. Those cities were colonies that the Greeks built in what they called Asia, specifically I think they were populated by the Ionian ethnic group of Greeks. Also you refer to the Parthenon being on mount Acropolis, acropolis just refers to the tallest hill in a city, acro for hill and polis for city. So most cities in Greece had an acropolis where they built their most important temples, because the altitude put them closer to Mount Olympus. It isn't a mountain and doesn't have specific name, just a title, the acropolis of Athens.
Less than 10k views for this video? maybe this video needs a better title for the You Tube algorithm gods.
Same owl is hidden in the dollar
Is it!? Very interesting I will check that out
@@MoneyMacro upper right corner on front in what looks like webbing. Some need a magnifying glass. Look in the "webbing" on the front of the dollar
@@MoneyMacro that owl has a long history. It's a deep rabbit hole but then again 'coincidence' theories run deep these days lol
Why did they charge so high interest back then?
Good question. One reason I think is that these voyages were insanely risky ... so big risk premium.
I didn't see whether the interest rate is compound or flat in the video. If the flat interest rate was used in that era, I think it is reasonable to charge 12% per year for the saving account. Seems easier to calculate in the time when there was no calculator.
You refer to the State, like we are in the modern times of top down hierarchy.
Hellenism has always functioned bottom up, so that makes your statements in the end, that free markets were "allowed" for money creation kionda misleading.
It was the Demos who decided things should function this way.
Great content but what’s going on with your voice? You have this rhythmic electronic tone thing going on that makes you sound like some AI programme - super distracting!
I’ve never noticed this in your other vids - some technical glitch !?
I made two mistakes here... First, placing the microphone too far away from myself so that it picked up a lot of reverb. Second, talking too slowly ... I tried to improve both after this video.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey sent me here
So..... who's up for some knowledge, while bashing people playing AC odyssey?
You need a better microphone.
I think it's the placement. I've bought an arm to bring it into a better position. Let me know if that helped in the next video.
@@MoneyMacro also work on your diction.
So freeloaders been with us for thousands of years 😂
Turkish cities??? Lol
You mean US dollars of the ancient world..😁
Indeed ☺️
they were no Turks in 4 century bc, they were Greek cities. It would be interesting to make a video about ECB and how money circulates through the system , who profits and how monetary policiess distribute wealth, how negative interests worked in Japan and in euro